Misleading the Public: BT and Windmill Opponents

2008-11-03 by mjr

The Advertising Standards Agency provides an RDF Site Summary (RSS) feed of their decisions, which seems to be updated more-or-less weekly. It can be an interesting way to keep informed about which companies are making misleading claims and why.

One of BT’s internet adverts just got banned for a whole range of reasons, including truthfulness, substantiation, failing to name clearly the services that form the basis of comparison and also failing to differences between services. “The ads must not appear again”

I’ve not trusted BT’s claims for a while – they assured me many months ago that they’d stop junk-mailing us and they still haven’t. I’m glad I’m with ThePhoneCoop.

On another note, I spotted ASA adjudications on FLAT and BLEW anti-windmill campaign ads recently. Now they really seem to be full of hot air. I can understand why the Severn tidal power projects are controversial, but has anyone ever seen “paths littered with dead and dying birds” around a windmill?

Posted in ThePhoneCoop | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Recent Events: London LinuxExpo, Toronto Free Software and Open Source Symposium, Public Sector Online, Get Online Day, the Global Financial Crisis, c&binet

2008-10-31 by mjr

Today’s the last day for the Gov.UK Consultation on Forced ISP Snooping: Please Say NO.

I didn’t get to LinuxExpo, partly because of Monday Machine-Mangling Madness but I saw LinuxExpo 2008 — Robert Castelo from the Drupal point-of-view. I also didn’t get to Public Sector Online (report by Andrew Lewin with links to more) and I definitely didn’t travel to Toronto, so the report on the Free Software and Open Source Symposium from Randy Metcalfe is pretty welcome.

I wrote about the Social Enterprise Photography Competition and Cooperatives South-West Trade Fair last Friday – the photography competition deadline has been extended to 7 November. So you’ve still time to capture a vision of a more progressive approach to business that values people and the planet as well as profit.

Last Friday was Get Online Day but TTLLP didn’t do anything for it this year – I took one look and reached similar conclusions to Graham Jones: Get online…! Oh – you are…! Related to that: on Tuesday, I got really annoyed about how many branches of government (national, regional, sub-regional and local) are obsessed about the private sector and are paying even less attention to other types of businesses, includingbuying off-the-shelf software which doesn’t conform to their stated policies about accessibility and interoperability. (Sorry if you saw evidence of that outburst… yes, local councillors are pretty powerless and get as annoyed about incompetent government services as everyone else.)

It seems I’m not the only one feeling that good cooperative businesses are being overlooked. The ICA have recently sent an open letter to the Governments of the G-8 reminding them that co-operative financial institutions are an alternative secure, stable and sustainable model of business owned and controlled by people.

Finally, a bit of advance notice here: “The inaugural Creativity & Business International Network (c&binet) will take place at The Grove in Hertfordshire from 26 – 28 October 2009” – is this something that free software and free culture supporters should get involved with? (And why did they pick a name that includes an XML special character?)

Posted in Cooperatives, Drupal, Koha | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Dot-coop Domain Renewal Hell

2008-10-30 by mjr

Without emailing us in advance, UK.domains.coop just expired our software.coop domain on 29 October instead of 5 November. When I looked at the renewal option in the control panel, the fees have increased by about 30% since last year. I don’t remember being told that and it’s more than what was authorised at the last TTLLP members’ meeting. If I remember correctly, the old price for the dot-coop domain was already five times the price of our dot-UK – now it’s more like six or seven times.

I’m sick of the service from UK.domains.coop. The services are owned and run by cooperatives, but it’s not one we can join, as far as I know. Their control panel is rented uncooperative software which doesn’t meet current accessibility standards – I have to reconfigure my browser each time I use it. The support has been a little slow and it’s apparently easy to configure a domain into a non-working setup that one can’t recover without help from the support staff. When I complained, it was suggested that we should work with them, but when I asked how, I never saw a reply.

So, I’m transferring our cooperative domain to a completely non-cooperative registrar. The DotCooperation LLC is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the US coop federation and not a cooperative itself, while domains.coop is a wholly-owned subsidiary of a UK regional retail coop and not a cooperative itself either, so does it really matter?

After working through a long list of registrars that claim to offer dot-coop domains and eliminating all those which only offer paper registrations (because I don’t want to wait for air-mail) or don’t appear to accept domain transfers, I was left with two and neither were cooperatives. I’ve picked one and only after ordering, I’m told it will take a week to transfer. Grrr. At least the support staff response was pretty quick.

That means that these news pages are at a temporary URL for a while. Email to software.coop addresses and the main information pages are offline. If the registrar we’re using turns out to be any good and responsive to feedback, I’ll see if we can resell their services next year.

Posted in Cooperatives, Koha, ThePhoneCoop | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Time to Re-Regulate the UK Mobile Phone Market

2008-10-30 by mjr

One of the things I wished for last month was a decent cooperative pay-as-you-go mobile phone service. About the same time, Ofcom started a social web consultation about mobile phone services. Now there’s an excellent presentation by Vivian Woodall, Chief Executive of The Phone Co-op that was given to FCS’ Comms Provider 08 event.

Ofcom’s Mobile citizens, mobile consumers: the importance of mobile suggests the idea of re-regulating is “controversial”. I’ve left a comment there that asks why. It seems obvious to me that UK mobile phone service is currently a market for lemons – useful independent measurements are few and far between, there are no trial periods and it’s often expensive to change provider. Maybe it’s different in the big cities.

Meanwhile, real complaints like An Orange-coloured hell, T-Mobile is the new Orange.. and Cancelling a Three mobile contract FAIL keep appearing with depressing frequency.

Just how big does the FAIL need to be before Ofcom actually intervene?

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Why Are You Distributing Leaflets?

2008-10-29 by mjr

Like all visitors to the Listening to the Social Entrepreneur conference, my pack included a leaflet from a university research centre. Today it popped up on the top of my in-tray while I was making a concerted effort to clear it. The leaflet is a description of the research centre, but it included a web address, so I visited that website. It contained essentially the same information and nothing else. What was the point of that? I already had their contact details in the attendee list. How much did these leaflets cost?

In general, it’s a little disappointing when you get a “null pointer” from a private company, but it’s particularly annoying from a university. University mistakes like “technology transfer programmes” (that stop software becoming free software available to social enterprises) are justified by a need to get more money – but clearly this particular university has money to waste. How about others?

If there was a way to subscribe to email or blog news of their research publications, I probably would have subscribed. Instead, I’ve just ranted here (without rewarding them with a link) and now I’m going to recycle the flier. I’ll probably have forgotten the three-letter acronym by next week. It’s simply bad marketing. It’s paper spam. Please, if you are putting things into conference handout packs, ask yourself why? What are you hoping to get out of it? How are you going to measure its success?

Posted in Cooperatives | Comments Off on Why Are You Distributing Leaflets?

Get Safe Online – but no encryption advice

2008-10-29 by mjr

One of the main UK computer security websites (Get Safe Online, GSO, a public/private partnership) has recently changed to using a website for security alerts, instead of sending emails that contained a “secret” word. Of course, a non-SSL website is not really safer or easier to verify than the emails, so I asked them: why don’t you use OpenPGP or GPG, like debian’s excellent security advisories?

The reply essentially boils down to “our target audience doesn’t use encryption software and we’re not going to educate them and other countries don’t either.” The encryption instructions on their site consists of an extremely vague explanation and links to a dozen or so other websites, along with insulting open source programs (which is disappointingly usual for GSO). The site is a little better than it was last year, but not much.

I think it’s a terrible shame that the gov.uk-supported site is failing to encourage encryption software use. Do you think this stems from a fear of strong encryption making it harder for the public sector to snoop on us?

So I guess this falls to the common/civil sector to promote personal security. How could we spread encryption software to the masses? GnuPG and as many mail client plugins as you can find? Icedove/Thunderbird and Enigmail?

Posted in SPI | Tagged , , , , , , | 4 Comments

HOWTO Apache httpd 2.2 PAM Authentication Modules

2008-10-28 by mjr

One consequence of the server outage was that I could finally justify the time to solve an irritating Apache authentication problem. In fact, I had to solve the problem, because I needed to log in to our control panels. (I really love our new control panels, but I wrote them, so I should. I’ll release a new version Real Soon Now. Don’t bother looking for the old version – it’s horribly out-of-date.)

The solution had two parts, both related to changes in the Authentication and Access Control of Apache httpd 2.2. In summary, it seems that there are now mod_auth modules which direct authentication (authn) modules and authorisation (authz) or access control modules, and there are some authnz modules which can do both parts.

So, the solution: Firstly, mod_authnz_external has become an easier way to do PAM authentication than getting mod_auth_pam to work with the new system. (As an alternative, I could have authenticated directly against the SQL database used by the control panel, but it seems neater to do all authentication through PAM.) So, the modules enabled were auth_basic, authn_file, authz_groupfile, authz_host and authnz_external, but it still gave an error message.

Secondly, I found a blog post about the no groups file? error I got then, which suggested re-enabling mod_authz_user. That cured the error, although I don’t yet understand why. The error and the solution don’t seem particularly related. But it works!

The above took me about 3 hours of researching, installing, configuring and testing to get working. My guess that it was an awkward job was right. I think TTLLP control panel customers will be glad they’re not paying all of that!

Posted in GNU/Linux | Tagged , , , , , , | 4 Comments

We Need Social Network Networks

2008-10-27 by mjr

A recent project was to install a WordPress plugin that will announce new articles to Twitter. As you might guess, I’m not a big fan of Twitter, or any other closed-source Web 2.0 thing. I use a few social network things, but not Twitter at present because I don’t really want yet another login.

So, I decided to solve a more general problem of status updates by using ping.fm and updating a wordpress plugin to work on PHP 4, as well as 5. I know PHP 4’s end-of-life is nigh but the target server still runs it for the forseeable future. While waiting for API key approval, on the same day as our server hiccough, GoDaddy broke ping.fm which broke the communication.

Now, while I could set up two ping.fm-like update services to avoid the single point of failure at a closed service, but that would mean that any updates would appear twice. Alternatively, some of the Twitter-like services can be told to watch the WordPress blogs for updates, but each one would need to be configured in a different way. Finally, there’s already a problem of redundancy and context with ping.fm which makes Adam Darowski and others hate it.

Can we solve this? Can we get support for the NoseRub protocol into everything and make a social network network? Will good things come out of the W3C Workshop on the Future of Social Networking, 15-16 January 2009 in Barcelona? Is the ultimate solution to junk all the closed social networks?

I wish I knew. In the meantime, at least it keeps me in work, hacking plugins, connecting stuff together. It’s bloody annoying sometimes, though. It seems like a Web 2.0 version of having a carpet that’s too small for the room, so you never get the whole floor covered at once.

Posted in Wordpress and Blogs | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Social Enterprise Photography Competition and Cooperatives South-West Trade Fair

2008-10-24 by mjr

Cooperatives South West is working in partnership with the Regional Infrastructure for Social Enterprise (RISE) to hold a Trade Fair with support from CDA (BRAVE Ltd.), Social Enterprise Works, Co-opportunity and Watershed Media Centre. It will be held on Monday 1 December at the Watershed in Bristol.

Due to the size of the venue, the number of exhibitors and delegates is limited, so complete the booking form as soon as possible. There is no charge for cooperatives to attend or to exhibit (but there will be a charge to cover catering and venue costs if you book but don’t attend or cancel).

The Social Enterprise Photography Competition is now launched across England. Regional winning photographs of the competition will be featured at the Trade Fair and the winners will be presented with their awards by a special guest. Please encourage all your friends and colleagues to submit photos of social enterprises.

(Thanks to Viv at Cooperatives-SW for the above information.)

Posted in Cooperatives | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Firmware and the Shape of Debian Lenny

2008-10-23 by mjr

Lenny is the codename for the next release of debian, which will be debian 5.0 formally. For the first time that I can remember, debian will fit on one disk. OK, so it’s a blu-ray disk (BD), but I’m sure it will be a selling point to some people. The announcement goes into some more detail about the implications for data transfer and mirror sizes, as well as noting that it stresses genisoimage beyond breaking point.

Before the release, there’s the small matter of about 200 bugs which we need to fix. If you can help, please do.

One prickly problem in some of the bugs is that a second debian release in a row is looking like it will allow violations of the Debian Free Software Guidelines into the release. (I don’t think all of the listed example bugs are violations, but some are). My main question about the firmware ones remains the same as two years ago:-

“I think the idea that refusing to ship non-free firmware in main will strengthen demand for free firmware is worthy of consideration. Debian helps users to take control of their operating system. Increasing the demand for free firmware might also help users to take control of their hardware, or at least highlight that there’s this crap which their operating system uses to support their hardware but doesn’t have its normal freedoms.”

“However, I’m undecided whether it’s a good idea to exclude them from the distribution CDs and so on. How big is the problem of vital hardware which won’t work without firmware being copied to it? Should we split non-free into non-free-hardware and non-free, allowing non-free-hardware packages onto the CDs?”

Ben’s technical blog: For those who care about firmware is tracking some of the hardware, but I don’t own any of the untested ones. That’s not surprising: I’ve been trying to avoid closed firmware for a few years now.

Debian bug #502959 discusses how one of the key debian project machines is affected. There’s a nice suggestion of using some of the project’s $64,000 to buy some hardware that’s fully supported by free software, but the bug has been closed by Peter Palfrader with the message “go screw yourselves and do something useful, like find a bridge”. Yikes.

Is there less vital hardware now than two years ago? Can the patches provided really not be included?

Posted in GNU/Linux | Tagged , , , , , , , | 5 Comments